Australian airlines are scrambling to reconfigure their international service flights to stay afloat and recoup losses incurred on steep price cuts to fend off lingering threats of competition, reports said.

According to Business Day, dwindling returns offered by service routes in Europe and much of the Asian regions have prompted both Qantas and Virgin Australia to seek more openings in the trans-Pacific route, with flights in the continental America promising some form of recovery.

High overheads due to rising fuel costs and labour issues had beset Australian carriers in the past few years and their woes, experts said, were further compounded by plunging air ticket prices that lowered companies' margins.

Qantas has earlier declared that its international flights outside of the United States market have been encountering structural issues, Business Day wrote, prodding many to assume that Australia's national carrier will do the natural thing - refocus more of its resources to the money-maker.

Yet aviation analysts have deemed the trans-Pacific route as already congested and dispatching more flights in the region will only engender the same problems met by Qantas and Virgin Australia in Europe, China and the Middle East, where local airliners have raised up the quality of their services in the past few years.

Combination of regulatory issues and pricing wars have somewhat muscled out possible outside competitors in the region, experts said, which were scenarios that could be replicated in the U.S. arena.

Recent indicators, however, confirmed Aussie airlines enthusiasm about the trans-Pacific market, with Flight Centre reporting that fares within America logging considerable increases by up to 20 percent in the past year.

Flights in key cities of the United States now average $1000 and more, according to Business Day, and notwithstanding the jump in ticket prices, travellers between Australia and America appear to pick up their flight frequencies as of September 2011.

Australia's Qantas and Virgin Australia reported seat capacity increases of 91 percent and 90 percent respectively while their American counterparts, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, revealed similar climbs of 92 percent and 87 percent respectively.

While giving no specific details on its immediate plans in Europe, Qantas merely allowed that it is cautiously watching developments on the European and Asian routes while gradually ceding some key destinations in the regions to its trade partners.

On Virgin's part, the company reported that its investments in trans-Pacific finally delivered some returns in fiscal 2011 its hope is further buoyed by regulatory nods of its operations in the region.